Virtues of War

by Steven Pressfield

  As recently as ten years ago, Nazirabad was a secure, attractive tourist destination. Brochures called it the “city of artists.” The Old Town had four souks, one entirely for tiles, another for decorative ironwork—gates, lamps, chandeliers. Nazirabad had two synagogues, believe it or not, and a Christian bookstore. A woman could walk alone and bareheaded, even after dark. Eighteen months ago, when our team deployed, a foreigner could still get a private villa, with cook, driver, and laundress. No more. In the space of ten weeks, since the start of the third Iran-Iraq war, the place has degenerated to a level of violence equal to Baghdad or Ramadi twenty-five years earlier—and the last half year has been even worse.

  We take side streets into the city, bypassing Checkpoint 290. The sun is dropping fast. Mac has made radio contact with our engineers; they have abandoned the company compound and made their way to a safe house (actually the home of their supervisor’s father) on Espresso Street, a well-to-do boulevard so named because it has the only Starbucks within five hundred miles. The only problem is that Espresso Street has become the epicenter for whatever conflagration is currently consuming the city.

  We approach from the west, so the sun is behind us. We can see Iranian-badged Hind gunships overhead, putting out rocket and machine-gun fire—probably at sniper teams on rooftops—and see the propellant trails of heat seekers and SFRs, shoulder-fired rockets, corkscrewing up in response. I’m navigating by the electrical power lines, which run along central thoroughfares and are the only objects taller than three stories in the city. In an urban firefight, you can’t simply race to the action like a fire truck toward a burning building. You have to patrol up to it, employing “movement to contact,” which basically means keep advancing until somebody starts shooting at you. Our engineers are talking us in over line-of-sight squad radios, which work for two seconds and then break up as buildings and vehicles intervene. “How close are you to the fight?” I speak into my mike.

  “We are the fight!” comes the answer.

  Espresso Street, when we enter it, is as broad as a boulevard and sizzling with spent shell casings, smoking bricks, rubble, and blocks of concrete-and-rebar and is pocked by craters from which ruptured water-main fluid floods, mingling with raw sewage, garbage, and gasoline to form an inch-deep burning lake across the welcome-to-hell cityscape. We pass one Russian-built Iranian T-79 tank coming out, protecting two gun trucks with wounded regulars inside and on top. Local civilians are running up to my window and Chutes’s, shouting that there are snipers on such and such a rooftop or drone swarms above such and such a block. Unarmed boys race on foot toward the action, just for the excitement. We see a press pickup, with “TV” on the windshield in masking tape. Chutes is my driver. The boom box blares Bloodstone’s “Death or Dismemberment”:

  Eat me, beat me

  Wolf me down and excrete me

  I’m here for your ass, motherfucker

  Cars are burning in the middle of the street; we’re jinking around downed phone poles. Adrenaline is flooding through me; I can tell because the pulse hemometer on my wrist reads out at 180/15. But my subjective experience is the opposite. I’m cool. The hotter it gets outside, the cooler I become. This is nothing I can take credit for or claim to have achieved by virtue of training or application of will. I was born this way. When I was nine years old and my old man would wallop the tar out of me for some infraction of his demented code of honor, I would stare up at him icy eyed and not feel a twinge of rage, even though I could have and would have killed him on the spot if I had taken a notion to. I was remote. I was detached. I felt like another person was inside me. This other person was me, only stronger and crueler, more cunning and more deadly.

  I never told anyone about this secret me. I was afraid they might think I was crazy, or try to take this other me away, or convince me that I should be ashamed of him. I wasn’t. I loved him. In sports or fistfights, in moments of crisis or decision, I cut loose my conventional self and let this inner me take over. He never hesitated. He never second-guessed. Later, in combat, when I began to experience fragments of recall that were clearly not from this lifetime, I knew at once that these memories were connected to my secret self. They were his memories. I was only the temporary vessel in which they were housed.

  This secret self is whom I surrender to now, entering Nazirabad. I become him. I feel fear. At times it threatens to overwhelm me. But my secret self pays no attention. I hear the gunships overhead and see the vapor trails of their rockets. A man must be crazy, I think, to head of his own free will toward that. But at the same time, no force beneath heaven can keep me away. This is what I was born for. I’m geeked out of my skull—and I’m curious. I want to see what’s up ahead. How bad is it? What kind of fucked-up shit will we run into this time?

  In action there is no such thing as thought, only instinct. We blow past two sharp exchanges of fire and suddenly there’s the house. Our engineers have spray-painted on the compound wall.

  THIS IS IT!!!

  in block letters two feet high. I wave to the other trucks: Keep moving. We can’t burst in on our own engineers or their bodyguards will shoot us, not to mention the wicked stream of fire that is pouring onto the compound from rooftops and circling drones and is now zeroing on us.

  “I know the place!” Chutes is shouting across at me. We accelerate past the rusty front gates—seven feet tall and perforated like cheese graters by .50-cal fire—and swerve hard left into an alley. Chutes is bawling across the seat at me. I can’t hear a word but I understand from his gestures: there’s a way in, from the rear, which we can access from one of the myriad cross-channels if we can find it. I’m raising the engineers and telling them to hold their fire when they see the rear gate blow in. “I will throw a flash-bang,” I enunciate with exaggerated clarity into the Motorola mike duct-taped to the right shoulder of my Kev-lite vest. “When you see the flash, run straight out to us.”

  Nothing works in combat the way you think it will. It takes us almost twenty minutes to cover the two hundred feet to the rear compound gate. By then our besieged engineers are too petrified to stick a toe out. Snipers are on every rooftop, with rocketmen racing up, more every minute. We break in the gate with our Lada Neva’s tailboard and are just starting in reverse across the court to the rear entry of the house, when one of the security men—a Fijian, no taller than five-foot-two, probably making forty bucks a day—appears in the rear egress, shouting, “IED! IED!” and pointing to the dirt drive over which our truck is about to roll. Three 177 mm artillery shells sit unburied, big as life, with their wires exposed, lining the south side of the lane. “Brake!” I shout to Chutes. The Fijian dives back into the house, one nanosecond ahead of a fusillade of 7.62 fire that blows the jamb and the security door to powder. Chutes powers the Lada Neva back out through the gate, to safety behind the four-foot-thick main wall. “What the fuck do we do now?”

  There’s nothing for us but to go in on foot, blasting every hajji triggerman on every rooftop as we go.

  Junk, Q, and I bolt back through the gate. The rear door of the compound is about sixty yards away. We dash past a line of parked Toyota trucks and Tata/LUK compgas cars; I can hear the sheet metal shredding as gunfire pursues us. We can hear Iranian voices everywhere, not just on the overlooming buildings, but on the flat roof of the compound building itself. They know exactly what’s happening. They could trigger the IEDs right now and take us out, but they’re greedy—they want our vehicles, too. We dive into an alley and take cover beneath two gigantic air-conditioning units supported by pipe stanchions. I can hear one gunner on an overhead taunting us in English. Another in a baseball cap pops up behind the roof wall and starts firing. I jack myself left-handed into the clear and blow his head off. “Man!” shouts Junk, whooping.

  I’m shouting to the Fijian, telling him we’re coming. “All!” I cry, pantomiming to the group. “Run for it!” Does he understand English? I can’t see him. Where are the engineers? The Fijian pops out again, flashing
five fingers and a thumbs-up. Again gunfire shreds his nest as he plunges back inside. Junk and I spring out. Hajjis are pouring gunfire from rooftops and upper-story windows. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Junk take a hit and drop. “Go!” he’s shouting. “I’m okay!”

  I reach the rear door. The engineers and two other Fijians crouch back in the dimness, which is dense with brick dust and smoke from the pulverized walls of the building. The engineers wear body armor and blue civilian Kevlars. The security men have on nothing thicker than khaki; one dude is in flip-flops. “There!” I point to the alley where Junk and Q have taken cover. “Now!”

  The mob gets ten steps and the first 177 blows. It’s the far one, the one closest to the rear gate. The dumb-bastard triggerman has pushed the wrong button. The blast still knocks every one of us flat and annihilates our hearing. I’m in the rear, driving the engineers forward. Everybody’s still alive. My head is ringing like a Chinese gong, but I can still hear the Iranians on the roofline cursing their numb-nuts triggerman. Our gang plunges to cover under the air-conditioning units. Quinones is kneeling between the A/Cs, firing at the V of two tenement rooftops above us. The enemy keeps popping up between clotheslines and satellite dishes. Every time Q pings one and the pink spray blows out of their heads and they drop away out of sight, the engineers yelp with terror and relief. Q and Junk are cross-decking now, firing over each other’s shoulders. We’re halfway to the compound wall, halfway to safety “Move now!” I shout.

  The group bolts to the gate and wall, to Chris, Chutes, and the others. Q and I are dragging one engineer, who has lost sight and hearing from the concussion of the 177, with Junk hopping on one leg and hanging on to one of the security men. We plunge back to safety just as full darkness falls.

  Chris’s two Kodiaks, which we had held in reserve two blocks back, have come forward now, ready to take us out. They’re revving in the alley, thirty feet north, in the safe zone shielded by an adjacent building. Enemy 5.56 and 7.62 fire is ripping into the wall above us. Now the rocket rounds start flying; our Lada Nevas and 7-ton truck have to pull back. Someone is helping Junk into the first vehicle. I hear one of Chris’s DSF men shouting in a German accent, “Who? Who’s missing?” For a moment I think they mean Junk. I look over. Junk is okay. Then I realize they’re talking about someone else. I turn back toward the compound. On the ground beside the air-conditioning units crawls one of our Fijians.

  Sonofabitch! The man is in the dirt, clawing his way toward cover. Furious fire rakes the ground around him. I see him scramble face-first into a cooking ditch, just as a full burst from an AK takes him square between the shoulder blades. Both elbows fly rearward, then flop; his neck snaps; he crashes face-first into the dirt. He stops moving. “Brake!” I’m shouting to Chutes. “Q! Chris!”

  “Go! Get out!” Chris Candelaria is calling, waving the vehicles to pull back. He has packed Junk’s wound and stripped his own tourniquet, worn lanyard-style around his neck; he’s cinching it around Junk’s thigh as he and the German DSF man help him toward the first Lada Neva.

  “We’re going back!” I shout.

  “What?”

  “The Fijian. We’re not leaving him!”

  A shoulder-fired rocket whistles overhead and blows the hell out of a house across Espresso Street. What little hearing I have left is now gone.

  “We’re not leaving without him.”

  It’s my secret me who’s talking. He has made the decision.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” This is Chutes, my tightest mate and most trusted brother. He sticks his jaw six inches from mine.

  “We’re going back,” I tell him.

  Junk curses. “He’s not our guy, chief! We don’t even know who the fuck he is!”

  “He’s dead!” says Chutes. “There’s two more 177s in there, waiting to blow!”

  Other faces stare at me.

  “Leave the body,” cries the Fijian team leader. “The man would say so himself if he could!”

  I tell the Fijians he’s not theirs, he’s ours.

  Chris Candelaria’s two Kodiaks are hauling ass now; they know they’re targets. Iranian rocket gunners are trying to blow down the building that protects our flank. As their rounds scream in, blocks of concrete the size of bowling balls sail a hundred feet into the air and fall back, crashing all around us. We scramble into the slit trench of sewage. Guys are trying to crawl up inside their helmets. I’m peering around the corner, back into the compound.

  Chutes clutches my sleeve. “Bro, listen to me. We got the engineers, we got the report … that’s what we came here for.” He points past the gate to the compound, to the fresh enemy streaming in along the rooflines. “We go back in there, somebody’s gonna die.”

  There’s no fear in Chutes’s voice. He’s just stating the truth.

  I meet his eyes.

  “Fuck you,” he says, jamming fresh magazines into his belly rig. “You hear me, bro? Fuck you!”

  Back we go. Chris Candelaria comes with us. We can hear the enemy hooting with anticipation. In the interval they have brought up a Russian PKM, which fires Eastern Bloc 7.62 rounds with a nutsack-shriveling rat-a-tat sound, and these are tearing the hell out of the open space we have to cross. The foe has got his second wind now. He is going after our Lada Nevas and the 7-ton truck, which have stayed behind to cover us. Rockets are zinging across the compound like Roman candles.

  We grab the dead Fijian and haul him facedown from the dirt behind the blown-down cookhouse. The IEDs never blow. Chutes curses me all the way back to the gate, curses me when I bag the security man’s effects and lash them around my waist with 550 cord. And he curses me all the way out of town.

  Two hours later, our team has reached safety in Husseinabad, in the fortified compound of an Iranian police chief whose real name is Gholamhossein Mattaki, but whom everyone calls Col. Achmed. Col. Achmed has his own doctor, his cousin Rajeef. Rajeef has a pharmacy and a little surgical suite in a side building of Col. Achmed’s compound. Rajeef is our team doctor. He supplies all our pills and powders. We call him “Medicare.”

  I have driven flat out to Col. Achmed’s, to get Junk (and two engineers whom we discover have been wounded in the dash across the compound) under serious medical care. Our medic Tony is a superb under-fire practitioner, and the DSF tech is good too. But neither one is a surgeon—and neither one has Dr. R’s goody-box of Vicodin and Percoset, Ultram, Fentanyl, OxyContin, and plain old central Asian smack. I also want to bury our Fijian in a site that won’t be desecrated. While our guys rehydrate and wolf down a meal of lamb and lentils, I grab Chutes and Chris Candelaria and organize a powwow with Col. Achmed. We still don’t know who’s invading whom, how dangerous the situation is, or what the hell is happening east in Isfahan and Tehran.

  Achmed is not just a police chief and commander in the paramilitary Masij. He is a hereditary tribal leader and a grandson and great-grandson of Harul and Arishi sheikhs; he is responsible for the safety and welfare of several thousand men, women, and children of allied families, clans, and subtribes. He’s a serious man.

  “Get out now,” he tells us, in the tone that your favorite uncle would take if he were looking out for you. We are in the third of his four storage buildings. The place looks like Costco. On racks and pallets sit unopened packing boxes of air conditioners and computer printers; cartons of Pennzoil, Pampers, and paper towels. Achmed has cases of Evian water, V8, Gatorade; crates of Nike running shoes, T-shirts, and tracksuits. The IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, smuggles in half the goods sold in Iran; the stuff comes in, billions of dollars’ worth, by launch and lighter from Kish and Qeshm, “free trade” islands across the gulf, via the port of Bandar Ganayeh—not to mention whatever the colonel’s minions have looted from ExxonMobil and BP. Guns and ammo are everywhere, in and out of crates—M4-40s, mortars, boxes of 5.56 and 7.62 NATO cartridges. Col. Achmed’s family, he tells us, is packing up. The women and children will flee to southern Iraq and then to Sy
ria. Achmed’s sons and goons fill the room, armed to the teeth. “Don’t wait even for morning,” the colonel tells me, Chutes, and Chris. “If you do, you and your men will be massacred.”

  I ask him who will come after us.

  “Me,” he says with a smile. “Everyone.”

  Col. Achmed explains.

  “They will not be able to help themselves. First they will come for your weapons and everything of yours that they can steal, then for honor, to avenge the humiliation you and your countrymen have inflicted upon our national manhood simply by your presence and your blue eyes. Next they will come to get you before others do, for the greatest honor goes to him who strikes first, while those who hesitate will be accounted cowards.”

  I ask him what will happen in the next week or ten days. He gives it to me in Revolutionspeak, but the gist is this: Shiite Iran—meaning those Revolutionary Guardsmen, army colonels, patriots, tribesmen, and true believers who have been biding their time throughout this long, phony war will unite now with their Iraqi Shiite coreligionists and, casting off the yoke of the West and its hirelings, strike east along the arc of the Shiite Crescent that runs from the Dasht-i-Margo—the Afghan Desert of Death—across Iran to the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia (not coincidentally the swath of real estate that contains the richest petroleum reserves on earth) and purge this land of those who do not belong or believe.

  “Do my men and I have time,” I ask, “to finish dinner?”

  Achmed’s tribal code mandates hospitality. He helps us bury our Fijian, though he insists, first, on declaring the man a convert to Islam (which Col. Achmed can do, being a mullah as well as a tribal chief, and to which none of our Fijian’s mates objects under the circumstances), then tops off our fuel tanks and loads us up with Neda spring water and sixteen-ounce cans of Beefaroni. One of Achmed’s sons brings a tray of delicious homemade sohan—pistachio candy.